ABSTRACT
What in fact we are offered in the only essay directly addressing the terms of the anthology’s title-Leonard Quart’s The religion of the market: Thatcherite politics and the British film of the 1980s’—is a quite useful overview of Thatcher’s broad political trajectory, expressed somewhat archaically (and therefore reductively?)—‘Thatcher recreated the Tory Party by taking power out of the hands of the squirearchy and aristocracy’ etc.; of Thatcherism’s impact upon lifestyle-‘acquisitive individualism and aggressive self-interest’; and of institutional and individual liberal/left creative revulsion and reaction. This is then followed by observations on films deemed to endorse Thatcherism (Chariots of Fire [1981]) or to criticize it (Brittania Hospital [1982], The Ploughman’s Lunch [1983], My Beautiful Laundrette [1985], High Hopes [1988], etc). (Such criticisms are presumably the fires which were started and ‘explain’ the otherwise mysterious ‘Fires were Started’ which appears as a subtitle on the book’s title page but not on its cover).
